Posts from 29th June 2005

29Jun 05

Erm… at the risk of appearing like a shameless self-publicist, me and my mate Carl are reviewing horror movies over here, and we’re looking for recommendations of stuff we might like (or find interesting). It’s not a very focussed endeavour, as my attempts to take in Creature from the Haunted Sea AND The Wicker Man on the same day will testify. If you have any bright ideas, please put them in the appropriate comment boxes.

Fusion then is the way forward. And has been so for the last fifty years, and so far no-one has really got a hang of how to do it. As the title says (from the how it works box on the BBC article) the building of mini-suns on Earth has traditionally been seen as
a) difficult
b) potentially dangerous.
Now I’m not saying that just because something is not dangerous that we should not give it a go. I’m not saying that the potential for BLOWING UP THE ENTIRE EARTH is no reason to give it a spin. Its just that part of me wishes Japan had got there first. In the end though fusion experiments are worthwhile because the alternative is covering Antartica with solar cells and equipping North Wales with enough propellers to make it resemble the Spruce Goose. That said, fusion has always been a couple of decades away, and I don’t see that changing soon.

*Hurrah for traditional nuclear power prejudice. One wonders exactly what The Simpsons has done for the image of nuclear power in the US?

There is something fantastically seventies about title sequences that have copyright notices in them. A lot of low budget indies, just about the time when non-studio films started to happen, had copyright notices on them (Sweet Sweetback being a good example, as is Texas Chainsaw Massacre). These days it is rarely seen, the copyright is a given, and anyway our credits are full of the fifteen different company and producer names who brought us the film. Which is why David Gordon Green’s copyright notice on the title page of Undertow is there purely as a hint to those sort of seventies films. Unsurprising as the entire film seems stuck together from homages of other films. Plenty of people have notice the Night Of The Hunter as a influence, but the film feels almost Cormanesque, or at least its early scenes have the energy of something knocked out quickly (the backwater feel of Boxcar Bertha springs to mind).

Whilst I enjoyed Undertow it seemed a slightly retrograde step for Green, whose previous films (All The Pretty Girls and George Washington) coasted along on a tremendously firm style. Yet Undertow has a much stronger narrative, and until the last twenty minutes, manages to suck you in whilst still playing to Gordon’s strengths as a director (playing on the edge of reality). Perhaps it is a case of too much too soon, the Terrance Malick production may have given us the Badlands feel, and the Phillip Glass score possible overshadows the work Green is doing himself. Or perhaps he just needs to make a Swamp Thing movie. That’s what the hip young directors are doing these days after all, and Green’s affiliation of backwaters and wastelands would fit that nicely.

In the end perhaps the failing of Undertow is that its a film which is impossible to talk about without refering to other films. What price copyright then?

There is one week in the year, one solitary week, when I buy asparagus. Usually. And it is this week my friends, when the glut arrives and the supermarkets (yes yes , I know, organic box blah blah) start a price war. They also start discounting ridiculously which left me with a nice bundle last night for twenty pee. On the turn possibly so it was straight to the stove. After considering a gratin and then discounting in because I still cannot get with the idea that cheese on toast is a proper dinner no matter how posh, I went for the old tried and tested risotto. This was almost scuppered when after frying the onion and bit o’bacon I realised I had no risotto rice. But that’s what flatmates cupboards are for. In the meantime the ‘grass was slowly going all dente, and I reserved the wood for a soup and started spooning in the stock.

I have made the error before of making a risotto with pretty much ONLY wine, and that was not very nice. However a risotto without any wine seems flat. But our flat had no wine. Not even in flatmates cupboard. Which is when I got creative. And got out the gin.

A shot seemed about right, burn off the alcohol but leave an interestingly juniper tang. And it worked a treat. Once the tips were dumped in and a generous slaver of butter added, the gin really added an aromatic tang to the risotto. What’s more it seemed to compliment the wee-altering taste of the asparagus. So much so that I also dumped a shot in the soup. On first tasting, the soup seems very nice, though tonight I need to add some cream and essential spices (SALT). But cooking with gin is here to stay round my house.

Time Machine

Featured Posts

26 Apr 1999
The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music […]

10 Jul 2017
#924, 4th May 2002 At The Disco A scene from Phonogram III: The Immaterial Girl, by Gillen, McKelvie and Wilson, published in 2015. It’s the early 00s, at a disco somewhere in the south of England. A group of people who love music so much it’s become their life and the tools of their craft […]

10 Mar 2015
This is a post listing the records I’m listening to for my YEAR OF ROCKISM**, as outlined here (cut and pasted from Tumblr): I’m going to listen to one album on a once-a-day basis for a week, a different one each week. Not in order to write about them or anything, unless I decide I […]

14 Nov 2006
In The Beginning There Was Nothingness. IF ONLY. In The Beginning There Was The Word. NOT THE BIRD FROM L7 PULLING DOWN HER KECKS AGAIN. But neither of these are strictly true. Because the first book of the Bible Of Badness is Genesis. And if you were ever to question how bad this Bible could […]

15 Sep 2013
Ten years ago tomorrow, I started writing a review of Al Martino’s “Here In My Heart”. I’d never heard the first UK Number One, and thanks to P2P networks I had the chance. Somewhere between starting the blog entry and finishing it, I thought of reviewing all of them. I had no idea how long […]

25 Jun 2018
No, you’ve not missed any matches. We’re putting this year’s games up as we get the entries in, and so it’s a big thankyou to the prompt Group E gaffers of Serbia, Brazil, Switzerland and Morocco. It’s a group of veteran pop managers in the dugout this match, but only two can progress beyond the […]

11 Oct 2006
The discerning televisual fan will be aware of the vacuum currently residing in the schedules between the 7.30pm end of Hollyoaks First Look and the 9pm commencement of Ghost Whisperer. There are only so many times one can flick between Puff Daddy jiggling next to the Lead Pussycat on TMF and the startlingly abhorrent animated […]

9 Jul 2010
So we get a winner, down on Brewer Street in Soho, the Glasshouse Stores was voted the number one pub of the noughties by those of us who voted. A nice pub sure, but so much better than the others? To find out why it scored so highly I thought I would canvas a number […]